With the continuous development of information technologies and the mushrooming of voice, data, multimedia services and other high-speed services, there arises a requirement on the intellectualization of conventional transport networks. Moreover, the ASON develops and matures gradually, and it begins to expand to WDM from SDH and is even capable of realizing a uniform control on multiple transport plane layers or on different domains. Therefore, ASON will be applied in more and more fields.
ASON technology makes a transport network intelligent by adding a control plane to the transport network and introducing the GMPLS protocols. The GMPLS protocols specifically comprise RSVP-TE, OSPF and link management protocols. The function of an ASON is mainly realized through the interaction and coordination control of the signaling and protocol of multiple ASON nodes. Therefore, a faulted ASON node in a network can be quickly located by capturing the signaling or protocol used between nodes.
At present, in a mobile communication system, the capturing of a message communicated between nodes is typically realized by a packet capturing tool installed on a management background, such as ethereal or wireshark. The packet capturing tool can selectively capture a desired data packet by setting the filtering conditions such as source IP address, the target IP address, or the protocol type of a packet. However, directly applying a packet capturing tool in an ASON will cause the following problems:
1) with the expansion of network services and the growing in the number of network service subscribers, the topology of an ASON will become more and more complicated. The number of the nodes of the ASON will grow increasingly, while a management background can only perform a packet capture analysis on one ASON node at a time. Therefore, when it is needed to track (e.g. establish a service) a signaling that is completed through the cooperation of multiple nodes, each ASON node is required to correspond to a management platform, which will cause a waste on network sources and make network structure more complicated;
2) even if multiple management backgrounds are used to capture packets, it is difficult to guarantee that the data of network elements of multiple ASON nodes are uniformly resolved according to a data sequence;
3) the filtering conditions offered by existing packet capturing tools are inflexible and are therefore inapplicable to an ASON; and
4) as a packet capturing tool captures all the signaling of an ASON node, if there are multiple services on the ASON node, it is impossible to find the message corresponding to a desired service from the captured packet.
In order to locate a fault in a network, an excellent solution that is currently provided for a mobile communication system in this industry is signaling tracking. Signaling tracking is an auxiliary tool installed on a network management background and playing an important role in the operation maintenance of telecommunication networks. By tracking and recording a signaling message between network element nodes, signaling tracking provides an important means for a subsequent signaling process analysis and fault location.
However, signaling tracking is seldom applied in optical transmission field due to some features of optical transmission network. As there are much protocol interaction and signaling interaction in an ASON and there has been provided no method for tracking signaling in an ASON, it is urgent to introduce a signaling tracking technology in an ASON to locate a fault in the network.